After six solid months of co-ordinated allegation from the mainstream media allied to the leadership of state security institutions, not one single scrap of solid evidence for Trump/Russia election hacking has emerged.

I do not support Donald Trump. I do support truth. There is much about Trump that I dislike intensely. Neither do I support the neo-liberal political establishment in the USA. The latter’s control of the mainstream media, and cunning manipulation of identity politics, seeks to portray the neo-liberal establishment as the heroes of decent values against Trump. Sadly, the idea that the neo-liberal establishment embodies decent values is completely untrue.

Truth disappeared so long ago in this witch-hunt that it is no longer even possible to define what the accusation is. Belief in “Russian hacking” of the US election has been elevated to a generic accusation of undefined wrongdoing, a vague malaise we are told is floating poisonously in the ether, but we are not allowed to analyse. What did the Russians actually do?

The original, base accusation is that it was the Russians who hacked the DNC and Podesta emails and passed them to Wikileaks. (I can assure you that is untrue).

The authenticity of those emails is not in question. What they revealed of cheating by the Democratic establishment in biasing the primaries against Bernie Sanders, led to the forced resignation of Debbie Wasserman Shultz as chair of the Democratic National Committee. They also led to the resignation from CNN of Donna Brazile, who had passed debate questions in advance to Clinton. Those are facts. They actually happened. Let us hold on to those facts, as we surf through lies. There was other nasty Clinton Foundation and cash for access stuff in the emails, but we do not even need to go there for the purpose of this argument.

The original “Russian hacking” allegation was that it was the Russians who nefariously obtained these damning emails and passed them to Wikileaks. The “evidence” for this was twofold. A report from private cyber security firm Crowdstrike claimed that metadata showed that the hackers had left behind clues, including the name of the founder of the Soviet security services. The second piece of evidence was that a blogger named Guccifer2 and a websitecalled DNC Leaks appeared to have access to some of the material around the same time that Wikileaks did, and that Guccifer2 could be Russian.

That is it. To this day, that is the sum total of actual “evidence” of Russian hacking. I won’t say hang on to it as a fact, because it contains no relevant fact. But at least it is some form of definable allegation of something happening, rather than “Russian hacking” being a simple article of faith like the Holy Trinity.

But there are a number of problems that prevent this being fact at all. Nobody has ever been able to refute the evidence of Bill Binney, former Technical Director of the NSA who designed its current surveillance systems. Bill has stated that the capability of the NSA is such, that if the DNC computers had been hacked, the NSA would be able to trace the actual packets of that information as those emails travelled over the internet, and give a precise time, to the second, for the hack. The NSA simply do not have the event – because there wasn’t one. I know Bill personally and am quite certain of his integrity.

As we have been repeatedly told, “17 intelligence agencies” sign up to the “Russian hacking”, yet all these king’s horses and all these king’s men have been unable to produce any evidence whatsoever of the purported “hack”. Largely because they are not in fact trying. Here is another actual fact I wish you to hang on to: The Democrats have refused the intelligence agencies access to their servers to discover what actually happened. I am going to say that again.

The Democrats have refused the intelligence agencies access to their servers to discover what actually happened.

The heads of the intelligence community have said that they regard the report from Crowdstrike – the Clinton aligned private cyber security firm – as adequate. Despite the fact that the Crowdstrike report plainly proves nothing whatsoever and is based entirely on an initial presumption there must have been a hack, as opposed to an internal download.

Not actually examining the obvious evidence has been a key tool in keeping the “Russian hacking” meme going. On 24 May the Guardian reported triumphantly, following the Washington Post, that

“Fox News falsely alleged federal authorities had found thousands of emails between Rich and Wikileaks, when in fact law enforcement officials disputed that Rich’s laptop had even been in possession of, or examined by, the FBI.”

It evidently did not occur to the Guardian as troubling, that those pretending to be investigating the murder of Seth Rich have not looked at his laptop.

There is a very plain pattern here of agencies promoting the notion of a fake “Russian crime”, while failing to take the most basic and obvious initial steps if they were really investigating its existence. I might add to that, there has been no contact with me at all by those supposedly investigating. I could tell them these were leaks not hacks. Wikileaks. The clue is in the name.

So those “17 agencies” are not really investigating but are prepared to endorse weird Crowdstrike claims, like the idea that Russia’s security services are so amateur as to leave fingerprints with the name of their founder. If the Russians fed the material to Wikileaks, why would they also set up a vainglorious persona like Guccifer2 who leaves obvious Russia pointing clues all over the place?

Of course we need to add from the Wikileaks “Vault 7” leak release, information that the CIA specifically deploys technology that leaves behind fake fingerprints of a Russian computer hacking operation.

Crowdstrike have a general anti-Russian attitude. They published a report seeking to allege that the same Russian entities which “had hacked” the DNC were involved in targeting for Russian artillery in the Ukraine. This has been utterly discredited.

Some of the more crazed “Russiagate” allegations have been quietly dropped. The mainstream media are hoping we will all forget their breathless endorsement of the reports of the charlatan Christopher Steele, a former middle ranking MI6 man with very limited contacts that he milked to sell lurid gossip to wealthy and gullible corporations. I confess I rather admire his chutzpah.

Given there is no hacking in the Russian hacking story, the charges have moved wider into a vague miasma of McCarthyite anti-Russian hysteria. Does anyone connected to Trump know any Russians? Do they have business links with Russian finance?

Of course they do. Trump is part of the worldwide oligarch class whose financial interests are woven into a vast worldwide network that enslaves pretty well the rest of us. As are the Clintons and the owners of the mainstream media who are stoking up the anti-Russian hysteria. It is all good for their armaments industry interests, in both Washington and Moscow.

Trump’s judgement is appalling. His sackings or inappropriate directions to people over this subject may damage him.

The old Watergate related wisdom is that it is not the crime that gets you, it is the cover-up. But there is a fundamental difference here. At the centre of Watergate there was an actual burglary. At the centre of Russian hacking there is a void, a hollow, and emptiness, an abyss, a yawning chasm. There is nothing there.

Those who believe that opposition to Trump justifies whipping up anti-Russian hysteria on a massive scale, on the basis of lies, are wrong. I remain positive that the movement Bernie Sanders started will bring a new dawn to America in the next few years. That depends on political campaigning by people on the ground and on social media. Leveraging falsehoods and cold war hysteria through mainstream media in an effort to somehow get Clinton back to power is not a viable alternative. It is a fantasy and even were it practical, I would not want it to succeed.

506 thoughts on “The Stink Without a Secret”

Seems it’s obvious there is no mechanism that kicks in that won’t let Craig on the BBC.

The beltway choice is simply made arbitrarily by people who are filtered in via there “acceptable” acceptence of the controlling, dominant factions of society. They are not going to undermine there own influence, they believe they are “legitimate”…+ it plays well.

I don’t know how helpful it is to try and subvert this by getting on it, it’s undermining itself by it’s own method. To get on such platforms is to be a tool. Because within that event they are the ones making the critical choices really, framing questions ect. You must limit yourself to be acceptable.

Never the less l respect thoes who try to get in with (metaphorically speaking) hight explosives strapped to themselves. But it’s never going to happen. Not in the way someone who would want, i,e, very effective.

You left out a very important piece of evidence I heard on BBC2 Newsnight. Allegedly one of the alleged hackers was using a yandex.com email account, Yandex being a Russian equivalent to Yahoo. A slam dunk or what!?

@ Oliver Tickell July 12, 2017 at 15:23
Hardly a slam-dunk. It is presumably not impossible for a CIA operative or asset getting such an account.
Now if the guy’s name was Ivan, that would be different. CIA would never dare use false names.

When following the news from Venezuela, the similarities with Salvador Allende’s Chile are rather striking : two countries blessed with valuable natural resources owned by the state (and not greedy foreign capitalists), both brought to chaos and the brink of ruin by economically illiterate and politically doctrinaire governments.

I believe that Chile can count itself blessed to have had a man with the courage to stand up to the loonies and sweep them into the dustbin of history.

With a lot of help from his Washington friends. But Pinochet wasn’t just friends with Thatcher. He was her economic inspiration, and the Chicago Group neocons were his. Worth noting that while Pinochet’s cronies and he got very rich indeed on the back of privatising anything not red-hot or nailed down, and 10% of the population did indeed see an improvement in their condition, inequality deepened and 45% were in poverty as his completely undemocratic rule progressed. Poverty in Chile means something beyond the meaning of poverty in the UK, incidentally.

The comparison with a mediaeval absolute monarch is probably not unfair, if we discard Shakespeare’s Establishment whitewash job. His methods were similar, although he certainly killed more of his own countrymen than Henry.

If I’m not mistaken the travesty that occured in Chile, was due to a dreadful economic experiment, carried out by Pinochet (Thatcher’s great friend). The whole murderous shambles was based around Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics thinking.

Moreover, Thatcher went on to adopt those economic policies (but no fighter jets blew up buildings in London, nor were there any mass murders). Instead we had prolonged reforming of our industries, which led to hundreds of thousands of families thrown on the breadline, or worse.

To this day the Tory party still follow that àwful economic mantra, in one form or another.

Let’s face it, Allende’s Chile was going the way of “Bolivarian” Venezuela before General Pinochet stepped in. Although one must admit, in fairness, that Presidents Chavez and Maduro Moros were/are even more economically illiterate than President Allende was. Toilet paper (shortage of) refers.

The assumption being that if market forces can’t make a good case for themselves, having a violent revolution, killing thousands, and installing a dictator to enforce them is the only ethical way to proceed?

And the fact being that Adam Smith was wrong. Market forces do not ensure fair prices, wages and treatment. They may ensure balance sheets acceptable to bankers, based on the artificial measure of growth, which determines how much money you can make if you already have a lot, without doing a hand’s turn. And they play beautifully into every control freak’s dream of strong and stable government – again with the metrics for strength and stability determined exclusively by financiers, rather than the people.

Pinochet did not benefit the majority of Chilenos (o Chilenas). He benefited the wealthy, previously scared of expropriation, and he benefited those close to him. Read what Wikipedia saith ( in order to do what Habba never does, and supply a source)

By the time of his death on 10 December 2006, about 300 criminal charges were still pending against him in Chile for numerous human rights violations during his 17-year rule, and tax evasion and embezzlement during and after his rule;[19] he was accused of having corruptly amassed at least 28 million USD.[20] Despite the indictment and 300 charges, he only served time in house arrest.

Oh, and, Habba –
The violent and repressive dictator Pinochet obviously appeals to you. But you excoriate Bashar al-Assad for being a violent and repressive dictator, don’t you? The only difference I can see is that the one was a Washington creation (in the name of freedom and democracy, natch) and the other wasn’t. Any thoughts on this?

No sign of the Saudi terror-funding item now on the BBC radio news, and it’s hard to find on their website. Seven hours to flatten a big, uncomfortable story. Not bad going, even by the state broadcaster’s standards.

Clinton had a substantial election slush fund from Saudi Arabia:http://www.voltairenet.org/article193924.html
so the question is, did May have a Saudi election slush fund, like Erdogan , Barzani, and other despots of the world? And did that prompt May to call an unnecessary election, simply to access the fund?

” He thinks his wealth will let him off ” Qur’an. The Saudis may think they have purchased five more years of UK political cover at the UN, but they obviously fail to understand that democracy can’t be bought. Democracy would finish the Saudis in one second. Does Mrs May think that UK xenophobia is selective, sneering at French hairy armpits and Indian dress, but turning a blind eye to British mini-nukes being dropped on Yemen?

Hello Ba’al
Unfortunately your sightly ironic? laconic?pithy? incisive? (not quite irony) note in your last paragraph speaks volumes. Still not easy to actually accept. We are led by blackguards, villains and crooks and gangsters.
What is to be done? Not a believer in violent revolution but sometimes it seems like the only way.

I’ve been asking that for some time. And I see no hope that anything I can think of will guarantee the desired benign effect. The major problem is that the UK isn’t making the rules any more. The standards of global business are now those of the lowest common denominator – I hesitate briefly before saying Arabs, Armenians and Levantines, despised in Victorian times for their flexible business ethics. And here – we’ll disagree, perhaps – I see national sovereignty as paramount. Given that, we still can’t change the world. But we can change us. Additionally, there has to be an economic counter-movement, with clear analysis of the illusory benefits of global market capitalism. And a focus on weaning the public off The Great British Bakeoff and football, and providing it with palatable education instead. Never mind political education: let’s avoid any more overoptimistic and corruptible ‘isms’, but highlighting how the expropriation of YOUR labour, Sir, actually, and in fact, enriches the influential few, can’t do any harm.

This poem, by Henry VI, should be surgically implanted in everyone:

Kingdoms are but cares
State is devoid of stay,
Riches are ready snares,
And hasten to decay
Pleasure is a privy prick
Which vice doth still provoke;
Pomps, imprompt; and fame, a flame;
Power, a smoldering smoke.
Who meanth to remove the rock
Owst of the slimy mud
Shall mire himself, and hardly scape
The swelling of the flood.

Materialism is inevitable and mass materialism is not. Spending a little time in my birth town after 60 years away. This is just a peculiar accident btw. Seaside town and on its uppers -quite ‘poor’ . My memory of it was as a vibrant working place, where everybody was busy , but it has succumbed to the lassitude of the times. It is noticeable that the old part of town is quite ‘interesting’ obviously once the scene of multiple business and much local activity and industry. However it is all ‘generified’-doors windows and all the visible features and distinctions have been eroded/ made standard by mass production and indolence. The word generified also resonates with gentrified-made ‘nice’ -a suspension of the expression of individualism,-real thoughts and signs of real actions and distinctive and unusual ideas-a kind of homogenisation of all both society and our behaviour and our understanding- a drear lassitude seems to consume all, and this is in the era of our great ‘individualism’ and the ‘liberty of consumption’.
One senses that the capacity to act and actually be an individual, with a distinct character, has been eroded and replaced by an entirely bogus personalised form of individuality. Mostly currently expressed angrily or despairingly on blogs or by the purchase of one brand, rather than another.

I like ‘generified’ as much as I too deplore what it describes. I never go back – too depressing. It’s bad enough living somewhere which had an identity once, and now hasn’t. NE mining villages for instance. On which bijou culs-de sac of kit houses have been thrown up for commuters to the nearest SE Asian-owned industry…

Nah, it’s too depressing. Swear for three seconds at the now-obligatory advert for something you don’t want, and enjoy the rest –

I am way late in this thread but what I don’t understand is why the two situations can’t be considered at the same time: it’s pretty obvious that a dissatisfied someone inside Hillary’s camp leaked emails/documents/whatevers to the MSM and the DNC blamed it on the Russians, but Donald and his entourage have been financially dependent on the Russian oligarchy in terms of his and his family’s dodgy real estate deals for years, and that’s not really a very good basis for setting up the Trump presidency inside the White House. Is it a question of Both Sides Do It? Mebbe – but they do it in different and possibly differently prosecutable ways – and right now Trump’s seem more blatant in terms of nepotism, and scarey, due to his inability to keep hold of an assertion/tweet (whether true or not) for longer than one day.

Craig is a friend of the publisher, not an insider to the US political shenanigans. It’s difficult to reveal what you don’t know. Difficult to Craig anyway. If you’re looking to shoot a pigeon, look which way they’re flying. Don’t shoot the one flying out of town because it’s full of fast food chicken bones from the bin, i.e. in this metaphor, the US BS about Russian hacking. Shoot the one flying into town, with its tummy full of fresh country corn and green shoots, i.e. in this metaphor personally-obtained inside information.

“Craig Murray, a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and a close associate of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, said in the report by the Daily Mail that he flew to Washington for a clandestine handoff with one of the email sources in September. He said he received a package in a wooded area near American University.”

If Seth Rich had particular worries about particular emails – I’m not sure but it seems to be 2 or 3 emails that are important – why was the download so over-reaching ?
It’s an open question as I haven’t looked at the wikileaks data.

I am amazed how some US democratic supporters such as yourself and Ben, who usually evince extreme cynicism of the MSM, in this instance seem to have fallen for their narrative hook line and sinker. Your presidential election was orchestrated to elect Clinton, but the plan failed because even the embarrassingly awful Trump was deemed a better bet than Clinton, the proven corrupt murdering warmongering banksters’ henchwoman.

Sure complain about Trump, but claiming Clinton would have been better is naive. BTW, in your opinion, which is better – shit or vomit?

No I didn’t overlook it. Trump is a dangerous ruthless scumbag who shouldn’t be president. However Clinton is a proven corrupt murdering warmongering banksters’ henchwoman and therefore shouldn’t be president either.

Instead of defending Clinton, you should be attacking her for colluding in cheating Sanders out of the democratic nomination. Sanders would undoubtedly have beaten Trump to the presidency. Scumbag Hilary is the cause of your problems.

Don’t take it personally, Trowbridge, nobody’s attacking you, just disagreeing with your political views. Let’s cling to the notion of freedom of thought, eh?

You ask how I explain Hillary stealing the primaries when she received over three million more votes than Bernie. Because the leaked emails revealed that ….

Top officials at the Democratic National Committee criticized and mocked Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont during the primary campaign, even though the organization publicly insisted that it was neutral in the race, according to committee emails made public on Friday by WikiLeaks.
[…]
Among the emails released on Friday were several embarrassing messages that suggest the committee’s chairwoman, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, and other officials favored Hillary Clinton over Mr. Sanders — a claim the senator made repeatedly during the primaries.

In one of the emails, dated May 21, Mark Paustenbach, a committee communications official, wrote to a colleague about the possibility of urging reporters to write that Mr. Sanders’s campaign was “a mess” after a glitch on the committee’s servers gave it access to Clinton voter data.

“Wondering if there’s a good Bernie narrative for a story, which is that Bernie never ever had his act together, that his campaign was a mess,” Mr. Paustenbach wrote to Luis Miranda, the communications director for the committee.

….etc, etc ….

How do YOU explain why Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned over the affair if there was no truth in it. And how do YOU explain why Clinton then immediately appointed Debbie Wasserman Schultz to head her election campaign’s 50-state programme if she didn’t support Schultz’s actions to undermine Sanders?

But never mind that, let’s back get to my often repeated point which you steadfastly ignore. I claim that Hilary Clinton is a corrupt murdering warmongering banksters’ henchwoman. Do you disagree with any of that?

I have written repeatedly of my hatred of the Clintons, like their driving Vince Foster to suicide as their bagman and then trying to cover it up by promoting it as murder, making the White House home for rejected criminals like Nixon, Helms and Al; Deep Throat” Haig, allowing the Iran-Contra loonies like North et al. to use Mena;s International Airport so much that Bill was forced to renew the CIA after he promised to end it, the real secrets behind Travelgate, his wild bombing of alleged al-Qaeda targets in the Sudan to avoid removal from office, etc, – that they tried to kill me in various ways so many times that Sweden’s security service Sapo stopped them.

I cannot think of persons i have hated more, and tried to stop. It’s a much better record then yours.

Leaving aside the two bullet suicide, you seem to believe that the Clintons are corrupt and involved in multiple murders including an attempted one on yourself. Why do you want one of them as president?

The Russians will have done very well by Clinton, particularly when she was SoS. They got a cut-price deal on uranium and then there were endless goodies to be found on her private e-mail server, with its link to the Pentagon server. All for a nice little donation to a charity of her choice no doubt. Perhaps they thought there was no more to be had from her.

When big money was on offer to the slush fund, the Clinton syndicate always accommodated it, no matter the source or how glaringly the donation might jar with their public rhetoric. (eg, the unequalled commitment to advancing women’s / LGBT rights and eradicating terrorism worldwide, and the repeated acceptance of multi-million donations from Saudi Arabia). A tame media could always be relied upon not to shine a spotlight on the syndicate’s Janus face. Print the legend, still the watchword when it comes to the Clintons.

“DO you just assume the entire country has the same political beliefs? LOL”

Forgive me. I should have known the donations were from that well-known faction of the Saudi elite that is pro-women’s / LGBT rights and opposed to the extremist Wahabbi interpretation of Islam. No wonder you actually laughed out loud ..

“Saudi Arabia is a country. Clinton was getting donations from Saudi Arabian individuals.”

That’s a foolish remark. The Saudi state and wealthy Saudi individuals are the same people. It’s just paying out of the left pocket instead of the right. Long tradition in the Islamic world, goes back to the 9th century at least, especially when it comes to paying jihadis.

I mean, do they steal women’s emails and DOX them when they for public office in Saudi Arabia? Because that’s pretty bad. Sanders people do that, apparently. Look at the bright side, at least the Clinton Foundation didn’t take money from Bernie Sanders, Craig Murray, or Julian Assange.

She is the one who cheated Bernie and the whole world had her emails because she deliberately used a private server and forwarded classified emails to Anthony Weiner who was sexting numerous young girls.

“Cheated Bernie”. LOL. Um, how exactly? Did Clinton use MK Ultra to mindcontrol everyone to not vote for him?

• Debbie Wasserman Schultz was head of the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
• Leaked emails proved the DNC cheated Bernie from winning the democratic nomination.
• Debbie Wasserman Schultz was forced to resign because of it.
• Hilary Clinton immediately appointed Schultz to lead her election campaign’s 50-state program.

I see you’d rather quibble with me than give Temporarily Sane a proper answer. OK I concede, you win …. now you can spend the time you’ve saved arguing with me on addressing his post.

He makes a pretty convincing case that you are a self-righteous and insufferably hypocritical whiner. I find your counter-arguments – “You Brits did it too” and “I protested against the Iraq War” and “I find your counter-arguments to be simplistic, superficial, and idiotic” – to be simplistic, superficial, and idiotic.

When, and how, exactly did you convince yourself that Clinton is an honest person who was victimized and had “her” election “stolen”, by the dark triad of Putin, Assange and Murray?

As an American you ought to shut up for a moment and consider again how often your country has “interfered” in other nations’ elections. It also regularly destroys sovereign states through economic sanctions and use of military force and is responsible for killing millions of civilian since 1945.

These are facts, and not a matter of opinion as you well know. But let’s get real for a moment.

Dictators are often accused by your government and its sycophants of “killing their own people” and sometimes this is even true. Thank God no American president or any of his special friends would stoop so low. American leaders are civilized and sophisticated, exceptional and indispensable really, and stick to killing “other people’s people in other people’s countries” (and pulverizing other people’s infrastructure and destroying other people’s civil society and starving other people’s children).

Sometimes they contract third parties to do the deeds, see Libya and Syria for recent examples, and have a bit of profitable fun selling weaponry to multiple belligerents on multiple sides within a single conflict.

The important thing, Bob, is keeping the slaughter and butchery far away form the eyes and minds of the American Volk in the Heimatland and keeping American casualties low. Foreigners can be dispatched to the afterlife with a clear conscience because they look and talk funny, eat revolting foods, and inexplicably get all angry and emotionally worked up when their kinfolk and friends are sacrificed so America can gift these second tier ingrates with freedom and democracy (without anyone even having to ask first, so might add.)

Libyans, I am told, are overjoyed with their new freedom to buy and sell slaves (the kinky ones get to….well, you know) and they now have three or four competing governments to choose from. More choice is always a good thing!
(66;66
Religious freedom is still a bit underdeveloped in Libya but what an improvement over the Gaddafi regime’s policy of cracking down on what it cynically called “extremists” and even “killers” thereby extinguishing the rights of pious and devout people to practice their faith as they see fit.

Where was I going with this again? Oh right, your belief, your faith, in a narrative for which there exists no e((vidence. The above is ludicrous nonsense presented in a way that I find mildly amusing, but if you deny verifiable facts about your country’s demented foreign policy you would have to believe in nonsense to keep cognitive dissonance at bay.

If, OTOH, you have a realistic grasp of US foreign policy you would drop the self-righteous, and insufferably hypocritical, whining about the sociopathic Mrs. Clinton having her ascension to the throne scuppered by phantoms and admit she and her party lost due to their incompetence and tone-deaf approach to campaigning.

A most excellent rant. Bob with expected impression might reply
with the usual anti-American jibe,but the lie to that can be shown
by the increasing numbers of Americans both on the Left and the
Right awake to their countries appalling misdeeds.

Anyone know whether this blogger has closed this blog down? Or even be topped by the many enemies of truth. After a rather fruitful flurry of exemplary blogging activity for a few weeks about real issues (GE, EU, media lies, etc.), which must have had the rightwingers, is real is, etc, who populate the comments area from time to time, writhing and fuming with rage, he appears to have dropped off the planet, leaving behind several hundred utterances of mostly tedious banter, surely of zero interest to the many thousands of visitors per day to this blog, who surely come in hope of hearing what the blogger has to offer.

The Tories’ Brexit Repeal Bill is a after all a power grab that will be used to undermine the devolved governments in Edinburgh and Cardiff.

David Mundell was, back in the spring, promising “a power bonanza” for Holyrood. As with all other Westminster promises in recent years it was a cynical lie. The Tories opposed devolution and only decided to take part in it as a tactic once it was instituted. They have bided their time and always planned to trash the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Senedd. The Tory right wing’s desire for Brexit was almost certainly fuelled in part by a desire to use a repatriation of powers from Brussels as a front to finish off meaningful devolution.

Scotland was conned out of devo max in the independence referendum aftermath. We are being taken out the EU against our democratic choice. Denied a second referendum by Westminster. Now devolution, the democratic choice of the people of Scotland in 1997, is going to be trashed by an essentially colonial government that is drifting ever closer to authoritarianism.

Labour and the Lib Dems will of course make a few noises of protest and then fall into line with the neoliberal consensus. While a tame mainstream media continues to encourage the public to avoid any serious weighing of the issues.

The unionists and their shills have created an ongoing SNP Bad propaganda that has made it harder for that party to get it’s vote out. They have clearly believed their own narrative and think that Scots are going to meekly accept both an imposed ultra hard brexit and the de facto end of devolution. The storm is coming.

The Scots are a pretty sorry bunch. not making a peep about the Tories getting rid of Willie McRae after the surprise Brighton bombing which made The Witch assume that the SNLA was not dead after all, and Willie without any evidence must have been behind it!

Don’t want to risk my life to investigate by going to this Sleepy Hollow.

You could come and visit the real birth place of legendary king Arthur and Merlin, and actually put your own foot in the stone at Dunadd, you can see the actual stone in the link, where he was crowned king. Or visit his last resting place Iona.

Or you could whilst in Glasgow, visit the street where Merlin was born Ardery street. ?

All we can hope for is that the power grab is so great and distasteful to the majority of Scots. That it stirs them from their slumber, and cries of independence become common in the streets of Scotland.

Derek Bateman post on his blog on July 4th called ‘The Day Job’ list all the things the SNP government is working on or has recently achieved. It’s a very different picture from the SNP Bad mantra that is continuous. You should have a read Fred and see if it doesn’t make you change your perspective just a wee bit.

The SNP are grievance politicians, they depend on people having grievances for their divisive politics to work. They would happily see every one in Scotland destitute if they thought it would get them closer to their obsession of independence and that is the goal they are working towards.

I think you are right. “The storm is coming” The current position just doesn’t seem viable. Brexit is almost certain to produce a serious economic calamity but I can’t see any way of resolving this.
Brexit will almost certainly have to occur.
Partly this is ‘good’-unfortunately- despite the reality that the leading brexiteers are a mixture of mad ideological loons, political gangsters, opportunists and outright crooks and liars-somehow there is a kernel of unwelcome wisdom in the whole Brexit scenario.
The EU is at the very ‘best’ , some kind of interim arrangement, but is truly not fit for the challenges that await us in the 21st Century. We forget the gross contrived scammery and iniquities of the CAP, the grossly inflated bureaucracy that is so barely accountable.
However at the moment it is probably the best arrangement that is possible. It is all a very hard pill to swallow.
These challenges are essentially the problem of reducing resources/increasing competition for resources, and the failure of the current unsustainable prevailing dominant business modelling, and the impact this will have on peoples’ lives, and our resilience.
It seems to me that resilience and the capacity for adapting to change is actually diminishing quite seriously. People have fewer and fewer useful skills,and more and more skills that are confined to very narrow corporate contexts, partly because there is apparently no need to acquire more robust skills due to the convenience of technology and the ever greater degree of specialisation.
There always seems to me, to be a quid pro quo or perhaps some kind of balanced equation about human affairs- the equation remains the same but the variables drift.
We seem to be less and less capable of living lives which are resourceful and resilient, and ‘genuinely independent’ minded, while at the same time we are more and more isolated, and have a (false) impression of being more individually ‘free’ to act according to our preferences. I have a great feeling that this sense of ‘instrumentality’ and the capacity to exist outside a complex social interdependence network is bogus. Our personal (private) capacities seem to be expanded but our ‘collective capacities’ ()the capacity for concerted, coherent action, of large coordinated groups) is seriously eroded.
Society is becoming ever more atomised, in order to consolidate an ideological position and unsustainable economic system, but which is convenient to the current techno-capitalist system of enterprise.
In a sense that is what the EU represents, and the rejection of this seem somehow ‘right’ to so many people. I think at root there is a discontent with a degraded sense of self, and its replacement with this bogus ‘G.W. Bushian’ liberty which now expresses itself, in a deeply futile way, as the conspiracy theorising and the abusive and irrational mentality that underlies modern communication such as twitter and trolling. This bogus freedom is driving people ‘mad’ The problem is that the process is now too far developed to be readily undone without really serious difficulties, and hardship.

I agree with much of all you’ve said. Your analysis seems quite Heideggerian. People grasp the inauthenticity of the system and the supremacy of the ‘they-self’. But all too often their ill-considered response – Brexit, Trump etc – only makes things worse.

” We forget the gross contrived scammery and iniquities of the CAP, the grossly inflated bureaucracy that is so barely accountable.”

What about the gross contrived scammery of the CO2 emmissions quotas? It makes long at office workers smoking vapes outside the office Emergency Exit in the pouring rain look noble and convincing.

The EU has been secretly conducting the proxy war on Islam in Libya and Syria for the last 10 years.
A bastion of decency and truth and our values, Against an epitome of stupidity, evil and Islamic ignorance. Well thanks Mr trump for explaining to us dum-dums why we in the West are the good-uns and why we have to keep them m-f ing muslims / used to be injuns but they’reall deadnow, commies, they’re all dead now, then aliens, they’re all dead now – down. What about badgers? Are they alldead now? Them teat-sucking badger immigrants not goin to steal our mothers’milk from us any longer, understand?

That just about wraps it up, DGP. May I associate myself with most of them sentiments?
There’s a most unfortunate angle to this, though. And that is that while a radical, and yes, painful, destabilisation of the current order is needed, and may indeed be inevitable, this will be – is being – enthusiastically supported by nations with a completely different agenda whose implementation also requires the current order to crash and burn.

So is Fallon Gong going to side with the US to bomb assad now, all this ceasefire talk is just a cover in typical fashion of great satan – macrons statement on assad was another version of the sarkozy mic left on trick !! We must have a vote in the commons.

^^ Almost certainly not, especially if he is tripping along the wrack-line of some far-off tropical sandy beach, carefree family in tow, lost in forgetful merriment. Somehow, that has never been my image of this blog-owner, but is a plausible explanation for his silence something that has been posited by Ears, above.

The goldfish mouthed R U S S I A at me the other day from its satanic orb in the lounge. We’re goin to get Disney to do a cartoon on the lines of how the evil foreign kraken octopus ex-commies stole the election from the lovely innocent cartoon fishes. The facts will fit the fiction if it takes the marines and the MSM 50 years to do it. OK?

I am very worried that the garbage in garbage out mentality of this story is just the tip of the Mr Whippy of American sloppy thinking. Mrs May has been offered quick trade deals with US corporate , garbage news, garbage GM food, garbage financial products, garbage artificial intelligence, garbage religion, garbage Chrysler cars, unsafe at any speed, garbage wars, garbage education, garbage carbon emissions trading, garbage NATO politics.

The Tories have form on food. Dorrell announced after ten years of pouruing money down the drain on culling BSE infected cows that no-one could have foreseen the consequences of Mrs Thatchers proposal to feed herbivore animals with animal offal. He is still in the Conservative Party. Similarly all the de-regulative financial mechanisms that crashed the global economy, still in place and nobody is questioning the last 30 years of continuous war against Islam.

We as a country cannot afford to build our future on the rocky political foundations of Nick Clegg’s coalition and now the DUP’s coalition with a failed Tory thesis, so brutally exposed by the 2007 crash, the fall of Libya to Islamist terrorism and the total destruction of the Grenfell Tower. The idea that the US with its atomised destruction of the three Twin Towers buildings, sub-prime mortgages and strategy of state-sponsored terror and destruction, is going to somehow prop us up in our hour of need is truly terrifying.

We should not be relying on Parliament either. Our ageing Queen has colluded all too readily with Tory racism against foreigners, foreign religions and foreign wars. There is nothing healthy about a MSM and a Crone being lodged fixedly in some glorious Victorian past. The UK parliament is like the old M4 suspension bridge at Bristol. On the outside it looks ok but inside its tendons of steel have metal fatigue. The democratic process is incapable of delivering change. It only produces more of the same tripe as before.

Mrs May should be relieved of her duties. She represents continuity with a failed Thatcher legacy. We should admit that Thatcherism has failed and go back to the last system that worked.

Which was? Imperialism? Or ‘have a destructive continental war and be compelled to rebuild the economy completely?’

This gets rather closer to a realistic analysis, I think:

The great illusion of Toryism for 200 years has been, essentially, that all revolts end up like the ones in Poldark. As long as you can deliver economic growth and social mobility, Jacobinism can be suppressed.

Nothing has prepared British Conservatism for an era where that is no longer possible.

Very good article, TY. Someone’s actually done some research there. But no-one this side the pond’s going to be too sensitive to Russian purchases of prestigious property with dodgy money. It’s how UK, Inc stays afloat.

In Mandelson’s industry*, money talks. Which is perhaps why Global Counsel’s ‘clients and network’ list includes three employees of Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank, two senior executives at Otkritie, another influential Moscow bank, and two of Renaissance Capital, an investment house controlled by Mikhail Prokhorov, a colourful mining billionaire.

Then there is Alex Genin, the CEO of Russia’s largest privately owned freight railcar lessor, Brunswick Rail. And George Ilich Rizhinashvili, the deputy chairman of GidroOGK, a federal hydro-electric generating firm. As so often, with Mandelson, there are wheels within wheels: GidroOGK’s CEO is Vyacheslav Sinyugin. He was Putin’s deputy energy minister until 2010.

‘Finally on the list, there is Lord Owen, the 76-year-old former SDP leader, whose Left-leaning principles appear not to have prevented him becoming a confidante of Alisher Usmanov, a Putin loyalist who owns a significant chunk of Arsenal Football club.

Lord Owen carries out paid work for two of Usmanov’s firms, Epion Holdings and USM Holdings, which are both registered in the tax haven of the British Virgin Islands. He is also a director of Europe Steel Ltd, a subsidiary of the oligarch’s Russian parent company Metalloinvest.’

You stated that you received the DNC documents from an intermediary. Could you get that person to go public? Even if they won’t tell who the leaker was, their statement would support your story. I really fear that if the latest sanctions bill against Russia becomes law, then it will result in dire consequences. President Putin has shown remarkable restraint for years, while being accused of various crimes and wrongdoing. I don’t see how he can refrain from retaliation any longer. Someone needs to reveal the whole truth about the DNC leak, and thus put an end to the “deep state” war machine in D.C.

You stated that you received the DNC documents from an intermediary. Could you get that person to go public? Even if they won’t tell who the leaker was, their statement would support your story. I really fear that if the latest sanctions bill against Russia becomes law, then it will result in dire consequences. President Putin has shown remarkable restraint for years, while being accused of various crimes and wrongdoing. I don’t see how he can refrain from retaliation any longer. Someone needs to reveal the whole truth about the DNC leak, and thus put an end to the “deep state” war machine in D.C.